Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:41:49 GMT
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Last-modified: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 01:28:24 GMT


<title>Broadcast Disks</title>

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<h2>Broadcast Disks: <br>
Data Management for Asymmetric <br>
Communication Environments</h2>
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<p> 
The <em>Broadcast Disks</em> project is investigating the use of
data broadcast to provide improved performance, scalability, and
availability in an increasingly important class of networked applications.
Many emerging application environments have the property that communication
among nodes is asymmetric.  Typically, servers can and/or must send much
more data to clients than clients send back to the servers.  Examples
include wireless networks with mobile clients, cable and direct satellite
broadcast television, information dispersal and information retrieval
applications.  Broadcast Disks exploits communication asymmetry by treating
a broadcast stream of data that are repeatedly and cyclicly transmitted as
a storage device.  The broadcast disk technique has two main components.
First, multiple broadcast programs (or ``disks'') with different latencies
are superimposed on a single broadcast channel, in order to provide
improved performance for non-uniform data access patterns and increased
availability for critical data.  Second, the technique integrates the use
of client storage resources for caching and prefetching data that is
delivered over the broadcast.  The challenges being addressed in this
project include: broadcast program generation, caching and prefetching
strategies, and adapting to volatile data, changing client needs, and
communication errors.  

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[ 
<!WA9><a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/~franklin/papers/twopager.ps.gz">
Project Summary</a>
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<!WA10><a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/bdisk/papers.html">
Recent Publications</a>
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<!WA11><a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/bdisk/group.html">
Project Members</a>
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<!WA12><a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/bdisk/sponsors.html">
Sponsors</a>
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